When And How To Use Maintenance Periods

We have often suggested that setting your caloric intake at 10-12 X body weight (in pounds) is a reasonable place to start for a fat-loss diet.

However, if you’re already eating below that figure and not losing fat then your metabolism is likely depressed to some extent (probably as a result of your diet) and you need to bring up your caloric intake to where your maintenance level SHOULD be (14-16 X BW) and spend some time there.

If a client has been in a severe deficit for a long time then my initial reaction is to bring their caloric intake up immediately to 15 X BW as I believe that further prolonging the deficit is only going to make matters worse.

More often though, I prefer to bring up their intake to about 13.5-14 X BW and progress upwards slowly from there. In this case, I’d bring them up to 13.5 X BW and then add a little more food each time their weight has stabilized for some time at that intake.

In either case, I won’t even consider moving a client into a deficit again until their weight has stabilized somewhere between 15.5-16 X BW and they’ve spend some time there to allow their metabolism to become accustomed to the new intake.

Of course, since a person in this situation may be maintaining weight at less than 10 X BW, adding more food can result in some weight gain.

But the reality is that you don’t have much choice. The only way to continue to lose fat if you’ve already hit such a plateau is to move deeper into a deficit and add increasing amounts of cardio which will only make the problem worse in the long term.

If you continue to press on into a deficit you can expect a disproportional amount of weight regain for the amount of food consumed when you finally do start eating again because your metabolism is depressed.

And when you try to get that weight off again it is going to be increasingly different each time if you don’t address the root issue.

Of course, we all want to get the fat off NOW. But if this situation sounds like you then you need to take a step back and learn to let go of the instant-gratification mindset.

Your long-term metabolic health is depending on it.

PS: How long this takes is NOT predictable and is entirely based on how YOUR body responds. A decent rule of thumb is that you should expect to be at maintenance for AT LEAST as long as you were in a deficit.

PPS: If this is you, I am aware that this sucks and this is not popular news that a person may want to receive, but that doesn’t make it any less true.